DORS/CLUC 2011 recap

This year's DORS/CLUC has been and gone, 18th in the row for the organisers, first one (but not the last!) for me. For those of you who not know, DORS/CLUC is a conference about GNU/Linux and open source, which took place in the nice town of Zagreb, Croatia, in one of the auditoriums of FER (Faculty of electronics and computer science). I attended the conference as a speaker with a lightning talk on PHPPlaneta.net and a regular talk on Zend Framework.

First of all, I'd like to thank Nikola Plejić from NeutrinoDev for having me crash at his place during these couple of days. I hope that I'll have the chance to return the favor one day :) BTW, if you need some Drupal/PHP/Python work done, you should talk to Nikola, he's a kick ass dev ;)

The overall feeling I have about this conference is GODDAMN THIS IS AWESOME I WANT MOAR!!!1! Seriously, great organising, great talks, great speakers, great people, great food, great town, great WiFi. Granted, I haven't attended a lot of conferences so far, but I honestly doubt it can get a lot better than this.

Organisation

I really can't say anything bad about the organisation. Before the conference the organisers where responsive via email and twitter for any questions/comments I had, the conference website was updated regularly. During the conference they worked hard to keep everything in order, to reduce the delays and to keep the coffee machine full of hot coffee at all times :)

Talks and speakers

The first day had Mark Shuttleworth, from Canonical and outter space as the keynote speaker with a talk generally on open source and Ubuntu. Adnan Hodžić gave one of the best talks about his experience on organising DebConf11 in Banja Luka. Other talks included web and mobile development, OpenStreetMap and some hardcore talks on LXC virtualization and MySQL fatal crash recovery.

The second day had Jan Wildeboer, Red Hat's evangelist as the keynote speaker, with a great talk on open source. Other talks were about some business wishy-washy (I skipped those :P), databases, open source in academia... Personally, I think the first day was better, but nevertheless the second day was great and interesting too.

Although a bit exhausting, as both days had more than 10 hours of talks, it was really worth it. Now only if I had more hours in a day so I could play around with and look more into all of the stuff I learned here.

In the end, I'm really glad I came here, will be here next year too. If you're into open source (and you better be! :P), I only can recommend you to check out and keep an eye on DORS/CLUC next year.

Until next time,
happy hackin'!